Approaching Ethics Through Humor (original) (raw)
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Using Lawyer Jokes to Teach Business Ethics: A Course Module
Most of us will agree that the legal profession gets little respect in the United States. There are scores of websites dedicated to lawyer jokes and almost all the humor is negative. Indeed, the humor is not only negative but is often is filled with hate and anger towards attorneys. In many of the jokes, it is clear that the only good lawyer is one who is dead. For example, try this joke with any other profession and it does not work. "What do you call 5000 dead________ at the bottom of the ocean? A good start!" It only works with lawyers. Why are lawyers so hated? One doubts that there is any other profession that has resulted in so many vicious jokes. This paper discusses how lawyer jokes can be used to teach the importance of ethics. Scores of lawyer jokes are provided for educators who teach business law or ethics to use in the classroom.
On the Popular Image of the Lawyer: Reflections in a Dark Glass
California Law Review, 1987
The most striking aspect of the image of the lawyer in popular culture is the intense hostility with which it is invested. Lawyers, to be sure, may have more than their fair share of common moral shortcomings. But they do not as individuals seem so very different from the rest of the population as to justify the special level of animosity that the profession seems to arouse in the general public. One thinks, for example, of the present genre of what has come to be called "lawyer jokes." For instance: Question: What is the difference between a dead lawyer in the road and a dead skunk? Answer: There are skid marks by the skunk. Or: Question: Why did the research scientist substitute lawyers for rats in his laboratory experiments? Answer: Lawyers breed more rapidly, scientists became less attached to them, and there are some things that rats just won't do. Lawyer bashing is of course nothing new. The genre goes back a long way. St. Luke says in the New Testament: "Woe unto you also, ye lawyers! for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne. ... "i Every lawyer or legal academic carries as a particularly heavy part of her cultural training the usual and vicious swipes at lawyers, from Shakespeare's "let's kill all the lawyers," 2 to Sir Thomas More's exclusion of lawyers from his Utopia because they are "a sort of people, whose profession it is to disguise matters." 3 The nineteenth-century readers and spellers of American schoolchildren often contained a game called "the Colonists,"
The lawyer as animal in American lawyer jokes
European Journal of Humour Research
In the early 1980s a new joke cycle appeared in the USA, and has continued to flourish ever since. This is the lawyer joke cycle. The greatest anger and irritation in lawyer jokes is directed at the cost of lawsuits, the high income of lawyers, as well as their greed and stinginess, ignorance and skillful manipulation, corruption and dishonesty. In American lawyer jokes there is a long tradition of comparing lawyers to different animals, generally ones which are considered dangerous, poisonous or slyall animals which have very negative connotations. It is not surprising that, among the parallels, one can find predators of different kinds, scavengers and parasites. The animals most frequently brought up in jokes as parallels to lawyers are sharks, vultures, tigers, snakes, foxes, ticks, leeches, and rats. The goal of this study is to concentrate only on a small segment of American lawyer jokes, namely, jokes in which lawyers are compared to animals.
The Watergate break-in and its cover-up in the early 1970s convinced the American public that lawyers will do illegal and immoral things for the sake of their clients' and their own interests. The organized bar responded to Watergate with several steps that were designed to clean up the profession. The ABA adopted a new set of professional rules,' law schools required students to study professional responsibility, and states required that lawyers pass a special professional responsibility exam. But continued problems in the legal profession have followed this attention to professional rules. In addition to the highly publicized lawyer leadership in the corporate takeover, savings and loan, and Whitewater scandals, observers of the legal profession find among lawyers a growing preoccupation with making money, 2 an increase in litigiousness, greater incivility, and more misuse of legal procedure. 3 It may be that the problem in the legal profession is not too little attention to rules, but too little attention to character.
2014
The Watergate break-in and its cover-up in the early 1970s convinced the American public that lawyers will do illegal and immoral things for the sake of their clients' and their own interests. The organized bar responded to Watergate with several steps that were designed to clean up the profession. The ABA adopted a new set of professional rules,' law schools required students to study professional responsibility, and states required that lawyers pass a special professional responsibility exam. But continued problems in the legal profession have followed this attention to professional rules. In addition to the highly publicized lawyer leadership in the corporate takeover, savings and loan, and Whitewater scandals, observers of the legal profession find among lawyers a growing preoccupation with making money, 2 an increase in litigiousness, greater incivility, and more misuse of legal procedure. 3 It may be that the problem in the legal profession is not too little attention to rules, but too little attention to character. This crisis in the legal profession is the subject of recent books by Yale law professor (now dean) Anthony T. Kronman 4 and Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon. 5 Neither Glendon nor Kronman calls for new professional rules. They resist the Enlightenment (and lawyerly) temptation to propose a rule to solve every problem. In very different ways, each calls for a return to an older, more subtle moral tradition-the exercise of virtues.
There but for Fortune: Real-Life vs. Fictional Case Studies in Legal Ethics
Fordham L. Rev., 2000
Law. This article expands on an essay that previously appeared in the Federal Bar Council News. Brian Hufnagel, Fordham Law 2002, provided valuable research assistance. 1. Phillip E. Areeda, The Socratic Method, 109 Harv. L Rev. 911, 916 (1996). 2. Certainly, lawyers in practice should also learn about professional responsibility from the experience they and their colleagues accumulate. Within law schools, at least, there are opportunities to do so, both in the context of law school clinical settings, see, e.g.,
Honor as a Deficient Aspiration for 'The Honorable Profession': The Lawyer as Nostromo
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
HONOR AS A DEFICIENT ASPIRATION 861 troubling studies was prepared recently by Lisa Lerman about prominent lawyers at "elite" law firms-once thought to be immune from corruption 9-who stole large amounts of money from their clients and partners through billing and expense fraud. 10 This appears to be a recent phenomenon. Lerman found reports of 36 cases since 1989, and none prior to that time." The lawyers involved were not only at the top of the profession, they had sterling reputations prior to the disclosure of their fraud. 12 Obviously, such behavior makes a